Correlation between terrestrial heat flow and thermal conductivity

Summary

The significant correlation coefficient between the terrestial heat flow and thermal conductivity computed from the continental heat flow data byHorai andNur [1]2) may be explained as a natural consequence of terrestrial heat flow through a random medium. The theory predicts a value of 0.40 for the correlation coefficient. A simple statistical test shows that the majority of the computed coefficients belong to the statistical population whose mean is equal to the theoretical correlation coefficient. There are, however, a few observations of unsually high correlation coefficient which cannot be explained by the above hypothesis.